Reading morphologically complex words: experimental evidence and learning models

The study of complex word processing has been centered on the notion of morpheme as a processing unit. Evidence from psycholinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology has been taken as suggestive of symbolic morphemic representations at the lexical level, on a par with words. However, several phenomena observed in morphological processing suggest a more complex picture. The crucial role played in reading by the distributional properties of both the complex word and its morphemic constituents (e.g., family size, morphological entropy, orthography-semantics consistency) highlights the limits of the ‘morpheme-as-unit’ assumption. Moreover, results from the developmental literature show that morphology is an age-related emergent aspect of written word processing, exploited to overcome reading challenges for both typically developing readers and children with dyslexia. A unitary account for this complex scenario may be offered by learning models that focus on form-to-meaning mapping.